Holiday travel annoyances

December 18, 2013 3:08 PM

Photo: Blend Images - Dave and Les Jacobs/Getty Images/Brand X

Image 1of/11

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 11

Combine holiday stress with travel tension and you have a recipe for frustration even a mug of spiked eggnog and "It's A Wonderful Life" won't fix. Read on for our top 10 holiday annoyances and, on the theory that misery loves company, share your biggest gripes that aren’t on the list in the comments. less

Combine holiday stress with travel tension and you have a recipe for frustration even a mug of spiked eggnog and "It's A Wonderful Life" won't fix. Read on for our top 10 holiday annoyances and, on the theory ... more

Photo: Hitoshi Nishimura, Getty Images

Combine holiday stress with travel tension and you have a recipe... Photo-5617939.76401 - SFGate

Image 2 of 11

Air passengers hauling enough “carry-on” baggage for a monthlong safari.

A suitcase, a hanger bag, a shoulder tote, two shopping bags bursting with gifts and a cooler packed with a four-course meal does not qualify as “one small carry-on bag plus one personal item,” even if flight attendants are willing to help you hoist it all to fill two overhead bins while 50 people wait in the jetway. If you can’t carry it yourself, it isn’t carry-on.

Dutifully paying to check a suitcase, then watching the safari-goers get theirs checked at the gate for free.

With ever-increasing fees for checked luggage, no one is going to check a bag if they can get it by the gate instead. The call for volunteers to relinquish large carry-ons to be checked free of charge has become a routine part of the boarding process. Fliers who submit to the draconian baggage fees are left feeling like chumps while those who ignore the carry-on restrictions are rewarded.

Three-fourths of the time, the machine doesn’t recognize your confirmation number, or it returns to the start menu no matter what “buttons” you touch, or it checks you in but staunchly maintains that your travel companion doesn’t exist. Most recently, an airline employee asked me what I was doing as I ran my boarding pass bar code, as instructed, through an unresponsive kiosk for the fourth time. Eyeing me as if I were a recent arrival from a distant planet, she said, “That doesn’t work – you have to type in your name.” Would it really be so much trouble to program the kiosk so that its instructions line up with reality?

Truculent kiosks. Three-fourths of the time, the machine... Photo-5618560.76401 - SFGate

Image 5 of 11

Flaky implementation of TSA rules.

I’ve had a sealed yogurt container allowed through the security checkpoint, then confiscated as a liquid 15 minutes later during a bag inspection at the gate. I recently had to toss a forgotten half-bottle of water at the security gate but was told I could buy a new bottle to take on board after I passed through security – only to have the new bottle confiscated at the gate. Can we please use some of that pricey technology to keep TSA agents on the same page?

If your connecting flight leaves from a different terminal than the one where your first flight landed, there’s no avoiding another security line. We all know that. But if your entire trip is on the same airplane with a stop on the way, why should we be forced off the plane for another security check just to reboard the same plane? Have passengers actually managed to acquire weapons of mass destruction during the first leg of a flight? This doesn’t always happen, and there seems to be no logic or pattern to when it does. It’s just the luck of the draw.

I’m sure there were good reasons for choosing these fine cities as airline hubs, but Christmas season travel was not among them. The probability of rain, sleet, snow and gloom of night reduces the chance of getting to your holiday gathering on time to about 50-50. Allowing an extra two days for travel if you’re routed through these blizzard-prone airports is probably not excessive.

I’ve made my peace with rental cars that blare alarms for no apparent reason and require arcane hand gestures to achieve reverse gear, but not until this month did I have to spend 20 minutes figuring out how to reset the trip meter. Banish the thought of an old-fashioned, one-touch button: I would have to hunt down a “config” button (cleverly disguised as a radio control) to turn the “Center Stack Display” from a radio readout into a “Driver Information Center.” Then all I had to was scroll until I found a Trip/Fuel menu, locate the Digital Odometer display, press the Trip 1 button and find “Set/Clear.” Do we really want hundreds of clueless renters hunting and pecking at a screen in the middle of the dashboard while hurtling down an unfamiliar freeway at 70 mph?

When your road food choices are mostly limited to overpriced airport food and oversized restaurant meals, you inevitably end up feeling bloated and lethargic. And that’s before you even get to grandma’s house, where you are obligated to demonstrate your love and good cheer by stuffing yourself silly – unless you want to break your grandma’s heart.

“Honor” be damned – most mini bars now have electronic sensors that ding you if you so much as touch an item. The days when you could tuck a water bottle in with the outlandishly overpriced hotel goodies are long gone; merely opening the mini-fridge is sometimes enough to trigger a charge. Some hotels have taken to offering an additional refrigerator for personal use – for a $25 to $40 fee. All hail hotels that include a real mini-fridge in the room rate.

It’s not only business travelers on expense accounts who need wireless connections on the road. Most travelers need to make reservations, check flight status and read email, among more frivolous activities. It’s incomprehensible that upscale hotels slap you with $15 to $25 daily fees, citing high costs as justification, yet a $69-a-night motel (and countless coffee shops, libraries and parks) manage to provide it for free – just as they do heating, plumbing and lighting. Is the luxury hotel industry trying to drive customers to lower-priced lodging?